American readers have long had an obsessive hunger for the South. Their urge to comprehend it and writers' compulsion to explain it have generated a vast subfield of American letters over the past century and a half. Even leaving aside the southern novelists, poets, and story writers, every few years since the 1850s a major book has been published that explores, praises, or condemns the region the historian David Potter called "a kind of sphinx on the American land." No American works of sociology outshine the classic studies of southern life by John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, and Arthur Raper. Few memoirs are as haunting as William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee or Ben Robertson's Red Hills and Cotton. No cultural portraits or commentaries have been more influential than James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South, and I'll Take My Stand, by "Twelve Southerners." But surpassing all these are the works of history that the region has inspired, which are quite simply the flower of American historical scholarship. With Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll and C. Vann Woodward's The Origins of the New South at the top of the list, the bibliography of southern history is as dazzling as it is lengthy. But alas, since the 1980s southern historical writing—with the notable exception of Edward Ayers's The Promise of the New South and a few others—has succumbed to the noisome trends infecting other areas of humanities scholarship. The historians say more and more about less and less. And they say it badly. Moreover, although they've been an especially politically engaged lot since the 1950s, recently they've too mechanically followed the politically correct line. This isn't surprising: if any region of the country could be defined by its struggles over that PC triumvirate, race, class, and gender, it's the South. But the result has been too many books that read like little more than self-satisfied indictments of the racist past—an easy and obvious target. Two important titles published this season, however, present fresh and especially nuanced views of the South's anguished and ambiguous history, and of the ambivalence at the heart of history and in the heart of man.

When the young historian Mark Schultz ventured to Hancock County, in Georgia's lower Piedmont, to collect oral reminiscences of the intersection of black and white lives in the first half of the twentieth century (primarily the 1910s through the 1930s), he expected to gather a record of unrelentingly brutal oppression and a rigid color line. His actual findings, presented in The Rural Face of White Supremacy (Illinois), an unusually rich and dense portrait (as much a work of sociology as of history), have led him to draw a far more complex and subtle picture. To be sure, Schultz found abundant evidence of a white-supremacist society (one ultimately upheld by violence, and in which blacks who found themselves in unfamiliar circumstances had constantly to negotiate the convolutions of racial etiquette). But in this rural setting he failed to find the formal segregation that characterized black-white relations in the South's cities. Instead he discovered a world defined by what he calls "a web of interconnectivity," in which blacks and whites (especially in the lower classes) regularly attended one another's churches; played ball, fished, hunted, and ate together as neighbors; chatted and spun yarns together, visited one another's homes, and helped and consoled one another in times of sickness and death. ("[You could] act like you were of the same family with close white sharecroppers," one black sharecropper remembered.) In short, in this shared culture the races were intensely intimate—and their interactions were usually characterized by decency and good manners—if never equal. Although Schultz scrupulously eschews romanticizing what Martin Luther King Jr. called the "intimacy of life" between rural blacks and whites, his work corrects some of the best-publicized recent chronicles of southern life in this period, which too often treat white racial attitudes and behavior as a static and monolithic force. Those books also too easily assume that because by today's standards nearly all white southerners were racist, there's no point in distinguishing among their "racist" attitudes. A black sharecropper visiting a strange town in rural Arkansas, for instance, would care whether its sheriff opposed equal rights for blacks but favored some protection for them (however inadequate to modern sensibilities), or whether he was a virulent racist who would deny blacks the most basic rights and, indeed, would encourage threats to their lives and property. Although both sorts of white men may be reprehensible, both lived throughout the South, and the difference between them could mean life or death for a black man.

Schultz's compelling, detailed account illuminates the basic fact of southern history: the two races have always been inextricably bound together. W. J. Cash recognized this in his classic 1941 analysis of the southern mind ("Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude"), but he failed to develop what was at the time a scandalous argument. More recently historians such as John Boles and Mechal Sobel (who've revealed the biracial nature of antebellum southern evangelicalism) examined aspects of southern interracial history in detail. But Schultz's book and Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox (Knopf) are the first works that attempt to describe with precision the texture of day-to-day interaction across the color line. Ely, a historian at William and Mary, has unearthed a remarkably rich story. In 1796 Richard Randolph, Thomas Jefferson's cousin, manumitted his ninety slaves and settled them on land he owned, which they christened "Israel Hill," in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In a creative and exhaustive feat of archival research, Ely scrutinizes this group's relationship with the white community and, more generally, the relationship between blacks—free and slave—and whites throughout the county from the end of the eighteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. He reveals both the callousness and the closeness of the relationship between whites and slaves, a relationship at bottom based on unlimited force, but in which whites saw slaves "as distinct individuals—complex, diverse human beings," and from which could grow "affection and sympathy." More surprising, he finds that "tolerant, sometimes friendly relations" linked whites and free blacks, two groups that worked side by side for equal wages and were united by a common culture, elaborate and usually trusting business dealings, and intensely close religious ties. In 1897—during the bloodiest and most repressive period of race relations in American history—DuBois, who spent the summer studying the black communities in the county, found "economic interdependence of the two races, which promises much in the way of mutual forbearance and understanding." Like Schultz, Ely doesn't ignore the pervasive ideology of white supremacy, but in carefully analyzing day-to-day life, he finds that ideology failed to govern relationships between and attitudes toward individuals, and that "white folk in Prince Edward County, like people in other societies, valued good neighbors and esteemed good behavior"—even as he notes that daily civility, respect, and affection between free blacks and whites failed to end the institution of slavery or to replace the Jim Crow system. (Indeed, he speculates, "the very friendliness that could arise between members of the dominant group and the oppressed may have postponed change by encouraging white people to see their social system as less abusive than it was in fact.")

It would be an injustice to regard either of these books as soft-pedaling the white South's racist past. Rather, both accentuate the biracial—and tragic—aspects of southern history. Even during the South's most venomously racist period, Booker T. Washington claimed that wherever he traveled in the region, he could find "at least one white man who believed implicitly in one Negro, and one Negro who believed implicitly in one white man." That observation shouldn't surprise us. Of course southern blacks and whites had intricately and indelibly marked each other in centuries of living together. The interchange of the races has given birth to nearly every distinctive aspect of southern life—accent and food, music, the style and spirit of southern Protestantism, even the word "Dixie." Southerners' famed courtesy and manners, qualities that, as Ayers writes, are "perhaps the most tangible evidence of a Southern upbringing," developed, scholars concur, from the fusion of black and white attitudes. An intense attachment to the land, a strong folk culture, and an adherence to evangelical Christianity are quintessentially "southern" qualities—but that being so, "there is no one more quintessentially Southern," as Woodward wrote, "than the Southern Negro." Nevertheless, for 300 years the structure of southern economic and political life denied this kinship. Those humane relationships and feelings of affection and sympathy to which Washington referred, and which Schultz and Ely elucidate, were invariably constrained and distorted—and often destroyed. By insisting that the two races divorce themselves from each other, southern whites ensured that both blacks and whites would lose an integral part of themselves. DuBois probably best defined the torment of the white southerner (and one of the tragedies at the center of southern life): "Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro problems place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the caste-leveling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs and professions."

Picturing Faith, by Colleen McDannell (Yale). During the Depression the Farm Security Administration dispatched a band of photographers including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document various facets of rural existence. This striking book, with its lengthy and intelligent (if at times overly interpretive) text by the historian of religion Colleen McDannell, collects the FSA photos of rural religious culture. Traveling throughout Dixie in 1910, the English writer William Archer observed that "the South is by a long way the most simply and sincerely religious country that I ever was in," so it's not surprising that FSA photographers took more pictures of religious expression there than they did in any other region. What is surprising is that in a time in which, as McDannell writes, "a crushingly critical image" of evangelical Christianity prevailed, these northern, liberal, and secular photographers recorded southern evangelicalism with such sympathy, even admiration. They captured both its stark inwardness (conveyed, for instance, in the many pictures of the remote, famously austere wooden frame churches that all the photographers were moved to take) and the ways in which it was integrated into and nurtured community life.

Conjectures of Order, by Michael O'Brien (North Carolina). Thank God for university presses. What other kind of publisher would ever produce this hugely ambitious, sweeping yet recondite, keenly intelligent but often wrongheaded two-volume, 1,354-page history of intellectual life in the American South from 1810 to 1860? O'Brien has written on southern writers and thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s, but has mostly concentrated on antebellum southern intellectuals, especially South Carolinians. An American historian at Cambridge, he's probably the most prolific scholar of southern intellectual history (a field that Yankees with a little learning incorrectly label an oxymoron). Though these volumes sound narrow, they're in fact breathtakingly grand. The writers, critics, economists, political theoreticians, theologians, philosophers, linguists, poets, sociologists, historians, jurists, and scholars assessed herein were the most cosmopolitan, highly educated, and intellectually capable group the United States produced from the Revolution to the Civil War, and O'Brien's is as much a history of the society that formed them (although he carefully points out how imperfectly their views mirrored that society) as it is a history of the (often highly abstract) ideas they engendered. He's especially careful to place these southerners in the context of European intellectual trends (they were probably the most well-traveled Americans, at home in Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Göttingen—"to most southerners Madame de Staël mattered more than Ralph Waldo Emerson"), and he finds them "deeply implicated in modernity," an interpretation that's true as far as it goes, but that, I find, takes him in some wrong directions, especially concerning the theoretical arguments surrounding the defense of slavery. But although often stilted, this work is unusually astute (see O'Brien's analysis of John Taylor's political thought, and his chapters on the growth of the historical imagination and on southern thinkers' inventive assimilation of classical economics) and intellectually creative (see his lengthy and appropriately discursive chapter on the role of conversation in intellectual life). This is a work of lasting significance—it will (eventually) alter and widen our conceptions of the antebellum United States and of the currents of American thought.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.